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AMD Driver Support State For Radeon HD 7000 Series, Trinity

Phoronix: AMD Driver Support State For Radeon HD 7000 Series, Trinity

A few weeks ago I began talking about the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series driver support, but this week there is some new information to share about the hardware enablement for the next-generation of Radeon graphics processors as well as next year's AMD Trinity APUs...

There was a story a few weeks back that AMD had hired someone to work on OpenCL in the open source AMD drivers. I'm not sure if the guy (Tom I think) is extending clover or something else, but it should work on the open drivers hopefully, otherwise what is the point... Catalyst already has full OpenCL support under Linux.

Who knows what Ubuntu will do. Their 10.04 release shipped with a version of the kernel that wouldn't bring up my monitor over DVI with my RadeonHD 4670 and 5670. It never got fixed either, the latest LTS update CD still has that issue.

In cases where we have useful support available for an unreleased product, we try to synchronize the initial code push with the first major announcement that is "essentially a full launch", ie when our marketing folks release enough information about the product that we aren't messing up the launch plans by pushing code which contains the same detailed info. Usually that coincides with at least a partial embargo lift for review sites.

Depending on the product and time of the year there may just be a single "here's our new product and it's in stores today" announcement or there may be an earlier announcement such as the one curaga pointed out for Ontario/Brazos.

The current plan is to start a new driver for GCN, based on a stripped-down copy of the r600g code.

We can't really talk about driver schedules until the hardware schedules have been announced, you understand...

Launching, shipping and retail availability are three different things that can occur at different times (shipping must precede availability obviously). The Phoronix article referred to launch.

In the case of Brazos, shipping started ~2 months earlier than launch. In the case of R700, cards were available in retail more than a week before launch (a similar thing happened for NVidia DX10.1 generation cards).